School can't sell art donated by O'Keeffe

Tennessee
NASHVILLE -- Fisk University cannot sell any of the 101 works of art -- some worth millions of dollars -- donated by Georgia O'Keeffe in 1949, a judge ruled. Davidson County Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle ordered the historically black Nashville university not to sell any of the works in the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, noting they were donated for art education. (AP)

Washington, D.C.

States may force public sector labor unions to get consent from workers before using their fees for political activities, the Supreme Court said yesterday. The court unanimously upheld a Washington state law that applied to public employees who choose not to join the union. The workers are compelled to pay the equivalent of union dues, a portion of which the union uses for political activities. But the state's Democratic governor and Democratic-controlled Legislature recently changed the law to eliminate the provision that was upheld yesterday, blunting the impact of the court ruling.

Pluto, the puny former planet, is facing yet another indignity. Demoted from planethood a year ago into a new category of dwarf planet, it now turns out that it isn't even the biggest one of those. "This is sort of Pluto's last stand," joked Emily L. Schaller of the California Institute of Technology, coauthor of a report in yesterday's issue of the journal Science. Michael E. Brown, planetary astronomy professor, and Schaller, a graduate student, found that Eris, another dwarf planet, is 27 percent larger than Pluto. (AP)